# Team LEYA in 10th ABAW Competition: Multimodal Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12848 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12848/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Dawn of the transformer era in speech emotion recognition: closing the valence gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07378/) (2022)
- [BAH Dataset for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition in Videos for Digital Behavioural Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19328/) (2025)
- [AffectNet+: A Database for Enhancing Facial Expression Recognition with Soft-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22506/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [From Affect to Complex Behavior: Advancing Multimodal Human-Centered AI at the 10th ABAW Workshop & Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27451/) (2026)
- [HEDGE: A Calibrated Ensemble for A/H Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12176/) (2026)
- [CF-Net: Conflict Fusion with Speaker Normalisation and Certainty Weighting for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13976/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition via Cross-Attention and Gated Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15779/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ambivalence/hesitancy recognition in unconstrained videos is a challenging problem due to the subtle, multimodal, and context-dependent nature of this behavioral state. In this paper, a multimodal approach for video-level ambivalence/hesitancy recognition is presented for the 10th ABAW Competition. The proposed approach integrates four complementary modalities: scene, face, audio, and text. Scene dynamics are captured with a VideoMAE-based model, facial information is encoded through emotional frame-level embeddings aggregated by statistical pooling, acoustic representations are extracted with EmotionWav2Vec2.0 and processed by a Mamba-based temporal encoder, and linguistic cues are modeled using fine-tuned transformer-based text models. The resulting unimodal embeddings are further combined using multimodal fusion models, including prototype-augmented variants. Experiments on the BAH corpus demonstrate clear gains of multimodal fusion over all unimodal baselines. The best unimodal configuration achieved an average MF1 of 70.02%, whereas the best multimodal fusion model reached 83.25%. The highest final test performance, 71.43%, was obtained by an ensemble of five prototype-augmented fusion models. The obtained results highlight the importance of complementary multimodal cues and robust fusion strategies for ambivalence/hesitancy recognition.